England's European position.

The accession of George the First marked a change in the position of England as a member of the European Commonwealth. From the age of the Plantagenets to the age of the Revolution the country had stood apart from more than passing contact with the fortunes of the Continent; for if Wolsey had striven to make it an arbiter between France and the House of Austria the strain of the Reformation withdrew Henry and his successor from any effective interference in the strife across the Channel; and in spite of the conflict with the Armada Elizabeth aimed at the close as at the beginning of her reign mainly at keeping her realm as far as might be out of the struggle of western Europe against the ambition of Spain. Its attitude of isolation was yet more marked when England stood aloof from the Thirty Years' War, and after a fitful outbreak of energy under Cromwell looked idly on at the earlier efforts of Lewis the Fourteenth to become master of Europe. But with the Revolution this attitude became impossible. In driving out the Stuarts William had aimed mainly at enlisting England in the league against France; and France backed his effort by espousing the cause of the exiled king. To prevent the undoing of all that the Revolution had done England was forced to join the Great Alliance of the European peoples, and reluctantly as she was drawn into it she at once found herself its head. Political and military genius set William and Marlborough in the forefront of the struggle; Lewis reeled beneath the shock of Blenheim and Ramillies; and shameful as were some of its incidents the Peace of Utrecht left England the main barrier against the ambition of the House of Bourbon.

Nor was this a position from which any change of domestic policy could withdraw her. So long as a Stuart pretender threatened the throne of the Revolution, so long every adherent of the cause of the Revolution, whether Tory or Whig, was forced to guard jealously against the supremacy of the power which could alone bring about a Jacobite restoration. As the one check on France lay in the maintenance of a European concert, in her efforts to maintain this concert England was drawn out of the narrower circle of her own home interests to watch every movement of the nations from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. And not only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the powers of Europe, but it assigned her a special place among them. The result of the alliance and the war had been to establish what was then called a "balance of power" between the great European states; a balance which rested indeed not so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a compromise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a great struggle; but which, once recognized and established, could be adapted and readjusted, it was hoped, to the varying political conditions of the time. Of this balance of power, as recognized and defined in the Treaty of Utrecht and its successors, England became the special guardian. Her insular position made her almost the one great state which could have no dreams of continental aggrandizement; while the main aim of her policy, that of guarding the throne of the Revolution, secured her fidelity to the European settlement which offered an insuperable obstacle to a Jacobite invasion. Her only interest lay in the maintenance of European peace on the basis of an observance of European treaties.

Its results.

Nothing is at first sight more wearisome than the long line of alliances, triple and quadruple, the endless negotiations, the interminable congresses, the innumerable treaties, which make up the history of Europe during the earlier half of the eighteenth century; nor is it easy to follow with patience the meddlesome activity of English diplomacy during that period, its protests and interventions, its subsidies and guarantees, its intrigues and finessings, its bluster and its lies. But wearisome as it all is, it succeeded in its end, and its end was a noble one. Of the twenty-five years between the Revolution and the Peace of Utrecht all but five were years of war, and the five were a mere breathing-space in which the combatants on either side were girding themselves for fresh hostilities. That the twenty-five years which followed were for Europe as a whole a time of peace was due in great measure to the zeal with which England watched over the settlement that had been brought about at Utrecht. To a great extent her efforts averted war altogether; and when war could not be averted she brought it within as narrow limits and to as speedy an end as was possible. Diplomacy spent its ingenuity in countless choppings and changings of the smaller territories about the Mediterranean and elsewhere; but till the rise of Prussia under Frederick the Great it secured Europe as a whole from any world-wide struggle. Nor was this maintenance of European peace all the gain which the attitude of England brought with it. The stubborn policy of the Georgian statesmen has left its mark on our policy ever since. In struggling for peace and for the sanctity of treaties, even though the struggle was one of selfish interest, England took a ply which she has never wholly lost. Warlike and imperious as is her national temper, she has never been able to free herself from a sense that her business in the world is to seek peace alike for herself and for the nations about her, and that the best security for peace lies in her recognition, amidst whatever difficulties and seductions, of the force of international engagements and the sanctity of treaties. The sentiment has no doubt been deepened by other convictions, by convictions of at once a higher and a lower stamp, by a growing sense of the value of peace to an industrial nation, as by a growing sense of the moral evil and destructiveness of war. But strong as is the influence of both these sentiments on the peace-loving temper of the English people, that temper itself sprang from another source. It sprang from the sense of responsibility for the peace of the world, as a necessary condition of tranquillity and freedom at home, which grew into life with the earlier years of the eighteenth century.

England's intellectual influence.

Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the new attitude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our philosophy had exercised any corresponding influence on the Continent. It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion that a literature existed in England at all, or that her institutions were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they carried English ideas. The combination of material and military greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere, which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of 1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed, even in wretched translations, before the genius of Swift. France, above all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found about him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the nature of government Montesquieu studied English institutions as closely as he studied the institutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English science into his attempt at a survey and classification of the animal world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his ideas in politics and education.